By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing – published on Forbes.com on 4/17/20.

For any company, communications and marketing during a crisis (whether it’s an international or national emergency or something more localized) can be tremendously challenging across a range of areas. In times of crisis, many of the normal email best practices are either altered or heightened. It definitely isn’t business as usual.

Successful email marketers will dial in their messaging strategy to ensure it finds the right balance between continuing to serve its marketing purpose and taking the prevailing situation into account. Here are a few key areas for email marketers to focus their attention when running email campaigns in the face of a public crisis or emergency.

More Than Ever, Think About Your Audience

As marketers, we always want to focus on our audience. What will resonate with them and get them to engage with our content? This is a best practice for just about every marketer and certainly for email marketers in every campaign.

However, in a time of public crisis, it’s even more important that you really think about the people you are communicating with. While normally, you would tailor your email content to what you believe will catch their attention and convince them to engage, that also comes with an assumption that life is going along more or less like normal. During a crisis, people have a different mindset. They likely aren’t focused on a lot of the things that concern them in normal daily life. Instead, they may be preoccupied (and possibly consumed) with the crisis.

Read the rest at Forbes.com.